Strategy-based Fault Handling Mechanism for Composite Service

Service composition becomes more and more popular in enterprise application, and the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) has become the de facto standard for Web service composition. However, web services usually communicate over internet connections that are not highly reliable, so a large amount of effort in the development of a business process is spent on fault handling. What makes things worse is the static nature of BPEL. To address those problems, we propose a strategy-based fault handling mechanism for composite service providing user-defined fault handling strategy. This mechanism allows designer to separate the fault handling logic from the business logic and add new fault handling strategies without terminating the process instance. We also design a BPEL engine to support this mechanism.